Singing the hard drive blues

In my former life, I toiled as a systems analyst, where backups were built into everything we did. We drew up schedules for backing up the files on our disk drives, which today seem laughably huge compared to the number of bits and bytes they contained. When I started my business in 1985, I carried this philosophy with me, and backed up all client files on a regular basis. For years I was quite rigorous about backing up. And actually proud of it.

Last year I bought a spanking new MacBook. For some reason, over the last few months, I became a little lax about copying my files onto other media. I can’t explain why. (No excuse would be good enough anyway.) A couple of weeks ago, at lunch with a friend, we began talking about computers, and I told her I was going to buy a backup system I’d seen at the Apple Store. Well, a week later, before I had a chance to get to the Apple Store, I faced a dead hard drive on my desk one Monday morning. It just sat there, mocking me, refusing to boot up my system. Yes, I have other Macs in my office, but this one was my baby.

You don’t need to hear the whole sorry tale. Bottom line: the data was unrecoverable by conventional means, and I decided not to ship it to a data-recovery firm. As I told my friend Sallie Goetsch, author of the Backup Blog, ALMOST all my files were backed up, except for the ones that weren’t. Yes, lesson learned. Ouch.

I am disappointed that a 13-month old machine, which is treated as tenderly as a newborn child, could fail so completely. And, yes, I am now backing up my files about four times a day to a second hard drive and to my virtual iDisk. My former systems-analyst-self would be pleased.

P.S. My Apple dealer handed me my dead drive without a fuss, despite Apple’s much-maligned policy of keeping drives that have been replaced under warranty. I’m displaying it on my desk as a constant reminder.

Comments

[Parker]

Donna,

Not that it really matters to you at this point, but Slashdot might have a bit of insight into your hard drive failure:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/07/18/2255256.shtml

Cheers,
Parker

[Joan Vinall-Cox]

You have my sympathy - http://webtoolsforlearners.blogspot.com/2007/02/after-crash-final-accounting.html

From another surprised Mac owner.

[Donna Papacosta]

Thanks, Parker.

Joan, I just read your whole sorry tale on your blog. Sheesh. I tell you, I am now backing up at least four times a day. I am compulsive backer-upper once more. NEVER AGAIN shall I suffer at the hands of my computer.;-)